2 stars!

This book is now 10 years old. I still hear people rave about it and I don't know why. A random collection of anecdotes of conversations with paramilitaries, ostensibly about God and the role of religion in the Northern Ireland conflict. We learn, however, that most contemporary Republican paramilitaries aren't very religious and don't have more than a sentence to say about the subject. The sentence usually being, "Nah, I don't bother going to mass, me."

We also learn that all Loyalists are permanently teetering on the brink of being born again and then toppling back into the world of terrorism. We don't explore how much a theology that feeds a sense of exclusiveness and righteousness in a world of depraved sinners might feed into carving people up with a butcher's knife. We also have a long interview with Gusty Spence where God is barely mentioned (because Gusty is an athiest, which is fair enough), and a long section on self-censorship and MI6 maniputlation in the BBC, which is vaguely interesting but hardly relevant to the subject matter. The book contains one whole discussion (and a fairly short one at that) with a cleric or member of a mainstream Protestant church, which isn't so much a gap as a hole you could drive a motorway through.

This book was written when ECONI where at their ground-breaking prime, a group of Evangelicals examining how Evangelicalism fed into bigotry and how not to do so. You wouldn't know it from reading this book.

The book does merit a star for the brilliant, horrifying interviews with two Catholic priests who had had to administer the last rites to torture victims of the IRA's internal security unit, a harrowing piece of journalism. Genuinely brilliant, but not enough to fill a couple of hundred pages. Quotes from working class interviewees are rendered in W F Marshall style spelling (I was goin' t' m' Ma's the orr day so I was) which is patronising, irritating, and in most cases not a reflection of the Belfast or County Armagh dialect it purports to record.

Martin Dillon has written many important books about Northern Ireland. This is not one of them. Read The Dirty War or The Shankill Butchers instead. Reading this with a temperature of 38.5C was a particularly bad idea.